[2][3] According to Dawn newspaper, "Mazhar Ali Khan (1917-1993) was well known in his college days as a star debater, a lover of sports (tennis and swimming) and as a leader of a nationalist-minded and non-communal students' union.

Despite his feudal background, young Mazhar Ali Khan started mobilizing peasants that were working on his extended family's lands due to the prevailing influence and trend towards socialist thinking in the late 1940s.

[2] Mazhar Ali Khan's professional career may be divided into three parts – for the first 12 years, he wrote for The Pakistan Times which flourished under his editorial control and won the respect of the people.

Mazhar Ali Khan's emphasis was on truthfulness and objectivity[2] Then he had a relatively inactive period of 16 years, where he wrote an occasional column for different publications in Pakistan.

In the 1960s and 1970s, their son Tariq Ali (born in 1943) also became well-known as a British-Pakistani writer and a political activist with a socialist and communist viewpoint.